The basic equipment you need to make ice cream is a batch freezer, a blast freezer and a refrigerator to chill the mix. If you use our Express Base, you can avoid buying a pasteurizer–for a while! You achieve instant pasteurization by adding Express Base to just boiled water, saving thousands of dollars at startup, but it is likely that after your sales volume increases, you will want a pasteurizer.
Batch freezers are rated by the amount of liquid the freeze chamber can hold, NOT the amount of mix you can add. If you fill freeze chamber to the top with 15L of water, that is a 15L batch freezer. But, the batch freezer needs room to tumble the ice cream, adding air, which is essential. Also, freezing expands the volume. The mix you can add is about 60% of the freeze chamber volume. A 15L batch freezer will hold 8-9L of mix. So, if you have a 15L batch freezer, you can make about two 4.8L tubs every seven to ten minutes.
“Aging” the mix in the refrigerator makes the ice cream noticeably creamier and chilling it reduces freezing time.
A chilled batch will produce ice cream in about 7 minutes, but extruding the ice cream and getting the last bits out extends that to about 10 minutes.
Batch freezers come with a computer module that offers you many options. You can make the product harder or faster and set it for different products. But we have been using ours on the factory setting for 22 years, without exception. As the product hardens, the sound of the machine changes and after a while your ear becomes attuned to this.
An ice cream blast freezer is much colder than a restaurant batch freezer, operating at -30 to -40 C. Faster freezing reduces the size of the ice crystals being formed, making the product smoother and creamier.